John Cronin is the author of "AI Enters the IAM and IP Space as an App Store? You’re Kidding!"

Artificial Intelligence (AI) goes back to the 1950's, as defined by Minsky & McCarthy, to be "any task performed by a program or a machine that, if a human carried out the same activity, we would say the human had to apply intelligence to accomplish the task". This being the case, a lot has happened in almost 70 years since that statement. The history of AI can be easily researched; however, a reasonable definition can also be extracted from examples of how AI is being used and what AI is being used for.

As shown in the figure, AI needs to have algorithms, but they are likely not as complex as you think. A first form of Al algorithms can be as simple as software you create to manage your business processes, called Business Process Automation (BPA). In fact, developing your business flow diagrams and committing aspects of it to software today is this form of AI. It seems that today companies are developing customized software to manage tedious or complex aspects of their business process.
Next, it's critical to understand the use of Robotic Process Automation (RPA). RPA is the use of software with some aspects of AI or machine learning capabilities to handle high-volume, repeatable tasks that previously required humans to perform. An example of this is software for a "web crawler" on specific certain web searches that can eliminate hundreds of hours of searching each time the same searches need to be conducted.

The figure further shows that algorithms can be more complex. The algorithm may use mathematical correlations, of which there are many (such as auto correlations, convolution, etc.) to find correlations of one variable to another. An example might be a first variable, of "time of day," correlated to a second variable, "credit card items," for potentially very interesting insights. Note that human beings can do this work, but a computer executing this algorithm and process is much more efficient.